In 1998, Joanne Ruthsatz traveled to Louisiana to meet a 6-year-old musical genius. Ruthsatz, a graduate student at the time, hoped to evaluate the boy as part of her work “unearthing the inner workings of the prodigy mind.” While taking a break from testing her subject, Ruthsatz met the boy’s cousin — a nonverbal teenager with autism. She suddenly wondered: Could there be a link between one boy’s talent and his relative’s autism?

In The Prodigy&rsquo

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